Design and Fabrication of Hollow Mushroom-Like Cilia MEMS Vector Hydrophone

Vector hydrophone is the core equipment of underwater acoustic detection. Aiming at the problem of low sensitivity and short detection distance of existing vector hydrophone. In this article, a hollow mushroom-like cilia-sensitive structure is designed to optimize the hydrophone-sensitive unit. The optimal size of the hollow mushroom-like cilia MEMS vector hydrophone (MCVH) microstructure was determined by COMSOL5.6 simulation. The hollow structure is adopted, which not only ensures the working bandwidth of the hydrophone is 20-1000 Hz, but also improves the sensitivity of the hydrophone by increasing the receiving area of the sound wave. The test results show that the hollow structure has obvious 8 directivity, and the pit depth of the 8 directivity is larger than 40 dB at 315 Hz. Meantime, the sensitivity of MCVH can reach -180.9 dB at 1000 Hz. Compared with ciliary MEMS vector hydrophone (CVH), the sensitivity is improved by 16.8 dB.

Automated summary

A hollow mushroom-like cilia-sensitive structure was designed to optimize the sensitivity and detection distance of the existing vector hydrophone in underwater acoustic detection. The optimal size of the hollow mushroom-like cilia MEMS vector hydrophone (MCVH) microstructure was determined by COMSOL5.6 simulation. The hollow structure not only ensured a working bandwidth of 20-1000 Hz but also improved the sensitivity by increasing the receiving area of the sound wave. Test results showed that the hollow structure had obvious 8 directivity with a pit depth larger than 40 dB at 315 Hz. Meanwhile, the sensitivity of MCVH reached -180.9 dB at 1000 Hz, improving by 16.8 dB compared to ciliary MEMS vector hydrophone (CVH).